Techniques to improve website ranking in Google – SEO

In this article we’ll explore how Google Search works and we’ll talk about some safe SEO techniques which we can apply to improve our website. This article aims to improve organic search for a website to be easily discovered in Google search results.

You can think of searching for content on Google like searching in a very large phonebook. Every time you search for something it has to check it’s index for the most relevant search result.

What is SEO and Why is it important?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in search engines.

SEO brings high quality traffic to our websites without having to pay Google for Ads, so it’s a good return on investment.

High quality traffic means that people are actually looking for our products or services and thus good SEO has a higher chance for conversion.

For a website to show up in a Google search result first of all it must be crawled by Googlebot, which basically means Google knows about your website. It must be index and it has to have relevant content based on the user’s search query.

The most important factors which have high impact on search results for a website are:

When Googlebot is crawling a website it goes through each link it can find and it builds a massive index of all the words it can find in each page. This is used in serving results for google search. Therefore we can help Google in identifying which words are most relevant for the content of our website. And we can also let it know what type of content can be found on a specific page of the website (products, recipies, reviews, events, video, articles, etc) with structured data markup.

How Google actually works?

Google follows many smart algorithms and has over 200 factors to consider when displaying search results. Furthermore Google changes their algorithms frequently from minor changes to major ones.

Due to these facts it’s impossible to predict how it actually works. Therefore it’s important to follow their guidelines and do as much as it’s in our power to help Google index our web pages to the best of it’s ability.

Basic SEO

Authorship (backlinks)

The first technique is called “link building”. In this technique we want other people to link back to our website, if the entity that’s linking to us is from a similar field as our website or it’s a website with more content than ours the better.

Here is a more detailed video directly from Google on how we can achieve this:

google search explained

The title tag

The <title> tag of a page is the first line of any search result, so it’s important to set meaningful titles for our web pages not just for the user, because they show up in the browser’s tab, but also for SEO purposes.

<title>Meaningful page title</title>

The meta element

Metadata elements are used to provide more information about a web page. Metadata will not be displayed on the page but it will be machine parsable.

Meta elements can take many attributes, some of the most important are:

keywords

description

author

language

robots

The keywords attribute is a highly debated topic regarding if search engines take it into account. It’s generally a good practice to use the keywords attribute, if it doesn’t help in google searches as much as other tags it does not mean it won’t help other search engines like Yahoo! or Bing.

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript">

The description attribute is used to provide more details about the page and describe how it relates to the search query.

<meta name="description" content="page description here" />

The author attribute is used to define the author of a page.

<meta name="author" content="Catalin Scaesteanu">

The language attribute tells the search engine what language the web page is written in.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

The robots attribute tells search engine crawlers if they are allowed to index a page or not and if they should follow links from a page or not.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

It’s also worth mentioning that if no page title or meta description is provided Google will try to create these based from link titles or other parts of the website.

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are links Google thinks are useful for users and it may display them beneath a search result. This process is automatically done by Google and can’t be influenced but good website structure can help in this process.

Rel=”canonical”

A rel canonical tag is a way to tell the search engine that one URL is equivalent to another URL.

It’s a means of preventing link duplication to the same web page.

For example if we our website is at http://example.com, and we have a link http://example.com/index.php basically we have 2 links pointing to http://example.com. We have to tell the search engine that http://example.com/index.php is actually the same as http://example.com by adding the rel canonical tag to the index.php page:

Related Articles

Gratitude for sharing this post on the techniques to improve website ranking in Google – SEO. I am also going to launch my art and craft blog so would like to advertise it using SEO. I might need to learn the basic skills so if anyone here knows about a good seo company, please let me know.

On-page and Off-page SEO are important to get organic traffic and improve in website ranking. Off-page activities are guest blog, blog posting, blog commenting, forum and more helps to improve ranking in search engine.